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Tesla CEO Elon Musk teases Cybertruck, Ford boasts 200,000 preorders for electric F-150 Lightning

Ford says it has received 200,000 preorders for F-150 Lightning and Tesla CEO Elon Musk says more information about the Cybertruck will be revealed soon. Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian breaks down the latest news in the electric vehicle market.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Something else that makes your eyes bug out with excitement, electric vehicles, especially when it comes to trucks. Let's bring in Pras Subramanian because the Ford F-150, the Lightning is electric, and I'm using electric as the adjective. Hot, hot, hot, and they're not going to deliver until next year, right?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, Adam, this is really a big milestone for Ford, 200,000 pre-orders of the electric Lightning F-150. You know, what caught my eye is that they said-- Ford said that 75% of these people who ordered this car are new to the brand, you know, that's huge. And it's not only to mention the fact that it's not just the F-150 Lightning pre-orders that are actually doing quite well, the Ford Mach-E electric EV car, that actually sold 22,000 cars year-to-date. Ford also seeing high demand for their E-Transit electric van.

But the problem here-- and you mentioned it, Adam, is the fact that it'll take three years for Ford to fulfill the backlog for Lightning pickups, right? So CEO Jim Farley was on CNBC yesterday talking about how they're going to do quote, "everything they can, whatever it takes to double production capacity." You know, so they're claiming that-- Farley's claiming that Ford's production capacity is half of demand. They've really got to kind of meet that.

Now, at the same time, Wall Street is sort of taking notice of Ford's rival here, right, Rivian. The company slowly ramping up, in this case, Rivian is going to be making around 100,000-- sorry 1,000 vehicles by the end of the year. They started making vehicles in about the summer or so. But Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas here actually kind of saying that Rivian is, quote-unquote, the one that can take on Tesla. He's seeing a number of factors here, the compelling product mix, product management, in this case, it means CEO RJ Scaringe and his kind of vision for the company, access to capital, as well as Amazon's relationship with the company. They own a piece of Rivian. And also they have 100,000 EV vans on order. So that's why Wall Street is bullish on Rivian here too.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Pras, speaking of Tesla, and elsewhere in the electric vehicle space. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is suggesting that we may get some more updates on the Cybertruck in the company's fourth-quarter earnings call. What are the details there?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, you know, I feel like Elon Musk here is a little bit-- he feels left out of the party. You know, a lot of buzz with the F-150 Lightning and also Rivian's R1T pickup. So he's kind of like wait, I need to get into this. So he's been teasing the fact on Twitter that he's going to join the next conference call that, you know, Emily, I know you follow the company, he actually missed the last call because he wanted, you know, the other executives to take over. He's going to come back in there and give us an update on the product roadmap overall, as well as the Cybertruck.

Recently he said that the Cybertruck would be-- an insane tech bandwagon-- would be available with quad engines. This is new to the Cybertruck watchers here because it originally was going to come out with a tri-motor setup, and now quad, and who does that sound like? That's Rivian, they have four quad motors in their car.

Also, he said that the actual Cybertruck would do the crab walk, where all the wheels turn in the same direction and the car moves, can kind of negotiate certain terrain. You know, who does that sound like? That's GM's Hummer EV that can do the crab walk too. So you know, maybe we'll hear more from Tesla and also Musk on whether he might have a solar roof panel on this truck, new interior tech, things like that. But one thing that is true is that the Cybertruck was meant to be produced by the end of this year in Austin but Tesla pushed that back to sometime in 2022. Maybe we'll get some clarity on that during that January conference call.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Pras, I don't know about you, but some of us when we see the Cybertruck, and it's pretty cool, I keep waiting for Tina Turner, "Beyond Thunderdome" to jump out and start singing, "We Don't Need Another Hero." It looks cool but it just has this "Mad Max" appeal to it. All right, Pras, catch you at the post after the show.